Casualty of War

On December 12th, Stephen Colbert’s“Word” was” Casualty of War.” You can watch it online here, but Colbert’s impeccable logic is so well crafted that I wanted to share this transcript (the text in brackets represent the text which appears in the on-screen box):

Now I was burning the Iraq Study Group report the other night and as I was about tear out page 94, I read this quote: …”there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq…On one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence.” This underreporting of the violence is terrible. Nation, we must fake these numbers lower! 93 is still sad, if you’re making up a number, why not 78? Or eleven? Or Zero!? Now the whine-a-nistas are gonna stay: But Stephen, you’re telling the government to lie to the American people! (Stay the course) Wrong! No, I’m just telling them to report the facts less. (De-facto leadership) You see the administration hasn’t been counting road side bombs or mortar attacks unless they harm U.S. personnel. (If an Iraqi falls in the woods…) And they haven’t been counting the killing of Iraqi’s if they can’t determine the source of the attack. I mean, who knows where that bullet came from? (Reagan administration?)

… Clearly the one thing we cannot do is leave (Troops just starting to get armor) because then Iraq will explode into even more violent chaos. But we will leave if the American people keep hearing about these casualties. So saying there no casualties is the only way to prevent greater casualties, therefore nation, it’s not a lie to say fewer Iraqis were killed than were actually killed, because by doing so we’re stopping more Iraqis from being killed in the future. Every lie we tell now will become truth then, but only if we have the courage not to tell the truth now.